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Noobie in studio, clothes photography. Need help! :)

T

tomasg

Guest
No idea about studio lighting, so I need some advice.

I am , more or less, an amateur photographer who has experience in photographing landscape and people in available light. I know how to use a flash for bounce, fill-flash, used it in several weddings for friends, but there my knowledge about artificial light ends.
I work in a company who sell clothes (working as web developer / programmer for online shops), and the company starts making the business online. The clothes - everything from dresses, jeans, children clothes, to all kind of accessories . The problem - clothes have to be shot at our company. The company want me to try making images of clothes as my part-time job (several weeks a year, I think), it would be challenging but interesting for me, but I have no idea about proper lighting, preparing, placing clothes and so on. I need help with that.

As I work remotely from the studio, I don't have any opportunity to experiment with the equipment, so I have to do some homework before I go to the studio, but I have no idea where to start. The equipment they have right now is:

Canon 40D
Tamron 18-200mm f3.5-6.3 XR DI II Lens
Elinchrom BXRi 500 Twin Flash Head Kit
Reflector Arm and Bracket with 110cm Silver/White Reflector

Several images I got from "studio":



So...

1. I have no experience with studio lighting. Any tips to start with? Anything missing speaking about hardware?
2. I have a suspicion that the canon 50/1.8 lens would be much better than the tamron in the situation because of nicer rendering and sharpness. Any comments about that?
3. Would love to get tips on clothes positioning. I have some examples where my colleagues (not photographers) tried to shoot - they don't use plastic models, that's fine with me (there are good enough examples in here: Pretty Round Neck Tops, Girls Tops, Girls Clothes, Girls and Boys ), so how to get the good look of them when lie on the plain surface? The examples they sent me when they tried look not so good. I need some advice to make the look of clothes more "alive", not flat (I don't even mention uneven lighting). By the way, the images were taken about 3 meters from products, shouldn't there be more distance to avoid geometrical distortions?




Roughtly cut (just for experiment) with PS to get the look what it gets on white in the online shop.


I'll also shoot some models wearing the clothes in natural environments - I plan to use natural light as much as possible (maybe even with my fujifilm x100), but the studio shoots... I need help and as much information as I can get :)


And by the way, for the Pro photographers. Can the "alive" images be get without serious post-processing?
 
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